Log24

"Where fashion sits" — Song lyric

Continued from August 20, 2013

In honor of Sam Peckinpah, the closing shot of his last film:

“Am I still on?” — Ending line of  The Osterman Weekend  (1983)

This post was suggested by today's previous post,
"Bali High Chair," that links to an empty chair award for
evangelical supporters of Mitt Romney, by Bauhaus style,
and by the example of Norwegian  design shown below—

(Happy Frigg's Day to Josefine Lyche.)

The phrase "deep play" in the previous post
was a borrowing from Clifford Geertz.

From another weblog's post on Geertz and
deep play—

When family is involved, the Balinese
are much more engaged.

See also the Balinese empty chair
and Amy Adams in this journal.

May 18, 2023 10:24 AM Eastern Daylight Time

CHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE) — It is with profound sadness
that Equity Residential (NYSE: EQR) mourns the death of its
Founder and Chairman, Samuel Zell, who died today at age 81.

Alex Traub in today’s online  New York Times —

“Helen Weaver, who fell in love with Jack Kerouac months before
‘On the Road’ rocketed him into the literary stratosphere, and who
53 years later made a record of their romance in an enduring book
of her own, died on April 13 at her home in Woodstock, N.Y.
She was 89.”

“The Beat rebel charmed Ms. Weaver with gentleness.
He agreed to attend a dinner party with Ms. Weaver’s
parents in New Milford, Conn., and began the evening
by asking whether they believed in God.”

“Helen Hemenway Weaver was born on June 18, 1931,
in Madison, Wis. Her father, Warren, was chairman of
the mathematics department at the University of
Wisconsin, and her mother, Mary (Hemenway) Weaver,
was a schoolteacher and later a homemaker.

Helen grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y., where the family had
moved when her father began working as an executive at
the Rockefeller Foundation and other nonprofit organizations.”

In Nomine Patris

The Times‘s Warren link above leads to an obituary of Warren Weaver:

From a post this morning  by Peter J. Cameron
in memory of John Horton Conway —

Farewell mein Lieber herr
Goodbye mein Lieber herr
It was a fine affair but now it's over
And though we made you Chair
You're not allowed to share
We're better off without you mein herr

Your talent was a Thousand Talents wide mein herr
Your chemistry with China mesmerized mein herr
It's really no surprise to find you lied mein herr
But that's why
FBI
Watched you spy...

* See "Jewel Box" in this journal.

From the University of Notre Dame in an obituary dated June 17 —

Related material (update of 9:20 PM ET on June 19) —

"Minow is the daughter of former Federal Communications Commission chairman 
Newton Minow, and his wife, Josephine (Baskin) Minow. She graduated from 
New Trier Township High School in 1972." — Wikipedia

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden, 
  Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
  Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?" 

BuzzFeed, Tuesday, January 10, 2017, on "the damning letter"—

From the Jan. 10 BuzzFeed story —

A searchable text of the alleged 1986 letter, along with the
alleged attached statement, is now available at
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/08/
coretta-scott-kings-letter-opposing-jeff-sessions-1986-full-text/21709762/.

A search of the letter and statement at that webpage yields
no instances of the phrases "racial practices," "established and enforced,"
or "personally hostile."

Hence the word "alleged" above.

Update of 1:44 PM ET on Feb. 9, 2017:

A relevant Wikipedia article —
Questioned document examination.

"The Osterman Weekend" (1983) —

“Am I still on?” — Ending line of  The Osterman Weekend  (1983)

"Intel announced today that the company’s former CEO
and Chairman Andrew S. Grove, who was born in Hungary
as András István Gróf, died today at age 79."

See also Intel in this journal.

In memory of the late Claus Adolf Moser,
Baron Moser, who reportedly died at 92  
on Friday, September 4, 2015.

Moser, a statistician, later became an arts
administrator as well. (He was chairman of the
Royal Opera House, 1974-1987).

Arts for Moser:

From the current New Yorker  (Sept. 7, 2015) —

From this journal last year —

But Is It Art? and Diamond Star
(Feb. 1 and Jan. 31, 2014): 

“Am I still on?” — Ending line of  The Osterman Weekend  (1983)

(Continued)

For film and TV director Ted Post, who
reportedly died on Tuesday, Aug. 20.

See that day's post "Conversations with
an Empty Chair" and today's NY Times—

Triple Threat

"'Mr. Remnick's work is smart, funny and insightful —
a triple threat Class Day speaker!' said Class Day
co-chair Lily Alberts." — News at Princeton

Related material: David Remnick on Miss Gould.

See also Remnick and Miss Gould in this journal.

A review of Max Bialystock's new smash hit,
"The Empty Chair"—

"Record-breaking!"

Frogs:

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time."

— Freeman Dyson (See July 22, 2011)

A Rhetorical Question:

Robert Osserman in 2004—

"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….

Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"

A Rhetorical Answer:

Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"

Related material:

• "Decomposition" in this journal 
• "What is Truth (continued)," May 1, 2012
• The Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT)
• Remarks on SAT by Stanislav Busygin
• A related remark on complexity by Busygin
• Hashtag #sexyface and the Empty Chair

Some background: 

The "big lie" strategy was originally described
by the National Socialists not as their own,
but  as the strategy of their enemies .

"And when I think about the values
that are important to me today,
I think first about meritocracy."

— Robert Diamond, Colby College '73, now
Chair of the Colby College Board of Trustees, in a
commencement address on Sunday, May 25, 2008

Other remarks on that Sunday —

• "Caught up in circles…"
• Wechsler Cubes
• Hall of Mirrors
• Sermon

Related material from Colby—

See also an MAA report on Gouvea from June 6, 2012.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday, April 2, 2012—

"I think there is in this country a war on religion.
 I think there is a desire to establish a religion
 in America known as secularism."

Nancy Haught of The Oregonian  on Leap Day, Feb. 29, 2012—

(See also this  journal on Leap Day.)

From New College: The Honors College of Florida—

See also, in this journal, "Greatest Show on Earth" and The Harvard Crimson—

From Sean D. Kelly, chairman of Harvard's philosophy department, on Oct. 13, 2011—

"What I’m looking for at the moment is a good reference from Plato to make it clear how he understands the term. I remember that in the Thaeatetus there is discussion of knowledge as true belief with logos, and a natural account here might count logos as something like rational justification or explanation. And perhaps Glaukon’s request in the Republic for an explanation or account (logos) of the claim that Justice is a good in itself is a clue. But there must be other places where the term appears in Plato. Does anyone have them?"

See instances of logos  under "Pl." (Plato) and "Id." (Idem ) in Liddell and Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon —

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=lo/gos .

(See also Liddell and Scott's "General List of Abbreviations"—

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Asection%3D5 .)

Austin Considine on a Tennessee tourist trap—

"It would be easy for a city slicker to assume this place misses its own punch lines."

It probably doesn't, but a certain academic  tourist trap does .

A trio of Harvard hicks—

1. The chairman of the Harvard philosophy department, Sean D. Kelly—

"Football can literally bring meaning to life."

(See also Garry Wills on Kelly, Rite of Spring, and Heisman Trophy.)

2. A professor of English at Harvard, Marjorie Garber, in a deconstructive meditation—

Garber notes that the word "literature" has two meanings– the English department's meaning, and that of other departments' references to "the literature."

"Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other."

— The Use and Abuse of Literature , published by Pantheon on March 29, 2011

3. The president of Harvard, Drew Faust—

A comment recently made to Faust—

“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged…."

Her response—

"Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her 'scold in chief.'"

—  University Diaries  today. See the excellent commentary there.

http://www.wittgen-cam.ac.uk/biogre9.html —

1935

With the expiry of his five-year Research Fellowship at Trinity College Wittgenstein was faced once more with the problem of loss of career. Accordingly he planned a journey to the Soviet Union, to find out whether he could find a suitable post there. Wittgenstein’s constant quest for the right career was not, as it is often misunderstood, a flight from himself. Rather, it was a search for the right place, a being at one with himself: Return him [Man] to his rightful element and everything will unfold and appear as healthy. (MS 125)

Since 1933/34 he had been taking lessons in Russian from the philosopher Fanja Pascal, initially with Francis Skinner. In June he asked Keynes for an introduction to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiski. He sought contacts in two places above all, at the Northern Institute in Leningrad and the Institute for National Minorities in Moscow, writing to Keynes on 6 July: These Institutes, as I am told, deal with people who want to go to the ‘colonies’ the newly colonized parts at the periphery of the U. S. S. R. (Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore)

On 12 September Wittgenstein arrived in Leningrad. There he met the author and educator Guryevich at the Northern Institute, then an autonomous faculty of Leningrad University. On the evening of the following day he travelled on to Moscow, arriving there on the morning of the 14th. Here he had contacts with various western Europeans and Americans, including the correspondent of the Daily Worker, Pat Sloane. Most of his discussions, however, were with scientists, for example the young mathematician Yanovskaya and the philosopher Yushevich from Moscow University, who were both close to so-called Mach Marxism and the Vienna Circle. He was invited by the philosopher Tatiana Nikolayeva Gornstein, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to teach philosophy at Leningrad University. He traveled to Kazakhstan, where he was offered a chair at the famous university where Tolstoy once studied. On 1 October he was back in Cambridge. The trip was shorter than planned, and it appears that he had given up the idea of settling in Russia.

His friend Gilbert Pattison, who picked him up from the ship on his return, recalled that Wittgenstein’s view was that he could not live there himself: One could live there, but only if one kept in mind the whole time that one could never speak one’s mind. … It is as though one were to spend the rest of one’s life in an army, any army, and that is a rather difficult thing for people who are educated. (Interview with Pattison)

S'en Allait Tout Simplement

Suggested by this morning's previous entry and by the following from The Chronicle of Higher Education—

The above Chronicle  illustration suggests a Log24 post from February 4, 2005— Fountainhead—

 Dominique and Dominique

"…in 1964, Dominique de Menil… became the chairperson of the Art Department at the University of St. Thomas, curating several exhibitions over the next few years. After being met with increasing resistance by the more traditional Basilian clergy at the University of St. Thomas, in 1969 the de Menils moved the Art Department—including the art history faculty—and Media Center to Rice University, where they founded the Institute for the Arts…." —Wikipedia

See also the remarks on the University of St. Thomas and Rice University in this morning's Architecture Continued.

Battleship Gray

“A colour is eternal.
It haunts time like a spirit.
It comes and it goes.
But where it comes it is the same colour.
It neither survives nor does it live.
It appears when it is wanted.”

– Alfred North Whitehead,
Science and the Modern World, 1925

Another Opening of Another Show

"What we've got now isn't really healthcare reform, it's a reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic as far as our patients are concerned, and we're going to make sure that we … have universal healthcare that is truly universal and has eliminated the insurance companies," she told Reuters.

— Deborah Burger, president-elect of the new 150,000-member National Nurses United, comprising union locals from Maine to Hawaii

Retired pastor William W. McDermet III on the editorial page of Saturday’s Buffalo News (Warren E. Buffett, chairman):

“In the 1940s, there was no Internet or television, so after school I amused myself with a snack of graham crackers and milk, maybe a comic book or a Tinkertoy project. Yet what was really exciting was a frequent ring of the doorbell, which mother answered, followed by the request: ‘Can Billy come out and play?'”

Excerpt from Fritz Leiber’s
“Damnation Morning,” 1959:

“Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me,

Our Lady of
Judgment Day

 ‘Look, Buster,
 do you want to live?'”

On Kirk Varnedoe

"At 42– a professor with no museum experience– he was named curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. It was, and is, the most influential job in the fluid, insular, fiercely contentious world of modern art. Just two decades past his last Amherst game, the lineman from Savannah was sitting in the chair where the most critical decisions in his profession are made– 'the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity,' according to his Olympian predecessor Alfred Barr. The Modern and its chief curator serve the American art establishment as a kind of aesthetic Supreme Court, and most of their rulings are beyond appeal."

— Hal Crowther

On Quality

“William T. Golden, an investment banker, a philanthropist and a main architect of American science policy in the 20th century who had the idea for a presidential science adviser, died on Sunday [Oct. 7, 2007] in Manhattan. He was 97….

His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was announced by the American Museum of Natural History, where he was chairman for five years and most recently chairman emeritus. Mr. Golden had helped found the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

For more than 50 years, Mr. Golden was at the nexus of science and society as a man who knew almost everybody in science and government.

His willingness to ‘buy the first tank of gas,’ as he put it, for worthy projects led him to serve as a trustee or officer or board member of nearly 100 organizations, universities and government agencies….

In 1989, when he bought from Harvard the Black Rock Forest in the Hudson Highlands, which was threatened by development, Mr. Golden explored its nearly 4,000 acres by horseback. He later turned over the forest to a consortium to preserve it.”

— Dennis Overbye, The New York Times, Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2007

 
Click for details.

See also the following art,
suggested by the Golden obituary’s
Mount Sinai, Black Rock, and
forest themes, as well as by
the “Deep Beauty” entry from
the date of Golden’s death:

Click for details.

From Andrew Cusack’s weblog:

April 21, 2005

‘For Christ and Liberty’

Though [it is] a purely Protestant institution (literally), I am rather fond of Patrick Henry College. Indeed, it takes some courage in this day and age to only admit students willing to sign a ten-point profession of Protestant Reformed faith. They also happen to have an old-fashioned ball featuring ‘English country dancing, delicacies such as cream puffs and truffles and leisurely strolls about the scenic grounds of the historic Selma Plantation’.

Anyhow, the college, whose motto is ‘For Christ and Liberty’, was visited [by] Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor to Touchstone magazine, who makes these comments:

Many of the points Esolen commends are things I hope will be found in the colleges of my university when I get around to starting it. I particularly admire that Patrick Henry College’s young men and women are just that, according to Esolen. This is all too often hard to achieve in modern American higher education, where students are quite often just elderly adolescents. (Though I suspect this has more to do with parents and family than education).

The absurdist drinking age that the Federal government underhandedly coerced each state into passing hinders maturity as well. Indeed, when I start the first college or colleges of the university I’m planning, each will have a private college bar which will serve anyone over the age of 16 or so. (Probably at the barman or barmaid’s discretion). Civil disobedience is the only solution.

Though the graduates Patrick Henry College provides will be Protestant (at least at the time of their graduation), I have no doubt that they will act as leaven to raise up the social and political life of our United States. I’m not particularly fond that they proudly advertise their commendation as “One of America’s Top Ten Conservative Colleges”. I’m not of the view that colleges ought to be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ per se. They ought to be seen more as communities of inquisitive, curious, intelligent people united in the quest for truth. Labels like ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are far too narrow and allow the simple-minded to pidgeon-hole things which are too complex for such monikers.

But anyhow, cheers for Patrick Henry College.

The First Idea

From aldaily.com,
a service of
The Chronicle of
Higher Education:

Peekaboo:

Wallace Stevens on “The First Idea”

Patty-cake:

Language, Poetry, Philology

“A specialist in Homer’s Odyssey and early Greek lyric poetry, Joseph Russo is the only American classicist among six international scholars to provide commentary for Oxford University Press’ three-volume edition of the epic poem.”

— Introduction to an inaugural lecture, “Language, Poetry, Philology, and ‘The Stateliest Measure,'” at Haverford College given by Joseph Russo on Feb. 26, 1999

Kierkegaard on death:

“I have thought too much about death not to know that he cannot speak earnestly about death who does not know how to employ (for awakening, please note) the subtlety and all the profound waggery which lies in death.  Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is.  To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.”

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

For more on “the thought of the eternal,”  see the discussion of the number 373 in Directions Out and Outside the World, both of 4/26/04.

“… as an inscription over the graveyard gate one could place ‘No compulsion here’ or ‘With us there is no compulsion.’ “

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

“In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were in Peterson Field in Colorado Springs.  A hot wind blew through that summer…. There was not much to do…. There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar.  The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice.  Heard him tell a girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’  As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.  Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

… When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.  And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free. could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

— Joan Didion,
   “John Wayne: A Love Song,” 1965

“He is home now. He is free.”

— Ron Reagan, Friday, June 11, 2004

“Beware, therefore, of the dead!  Beware of his kindness; beware of his definiteness, beware of his strength; beware of his pride!  But if you love him, then remember him lovingly, and learn from him, precisely as one who is dead, learn the kindness in thought, the definiteness in expression, the strength in unchangeableness, the pride in life which you would not be able to learn as well from any human being, even the most highly gifted.”

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 328

The Fog and the Fury

Headline and opening sentence of a column in the Washington Times:

“Job creation fog . . . and fury

Something must be done [to] restore jobs in U.S. manufacturing….”

So far, so good.  But the columnist goes on to explain the recent loss of manufacturing jobs:

“Let’s be honest. Some of these manufacturing jobs will not be coming back because of structural changes in our economy. Manufacturers have been reducing payrolls, in middle management and on the production line, because they have found ways to produce more goods at far less cost, boosting profits for further expansion and fatter investor and worker pension dividends.”

Uh-huh.

Here is a different explanation (the “fury,” as opposed to “the fog”), from a March 10 column:

“Last week’s jobs report, with hundreds of thousands giving up the search for work, and manufacturing jobs disappearing for the 43rd straight month, jolted the White House. What is going on?

They’re calling it a jobless recovery. Wrong. Millions of jobs are being created. They’re just not being created here in the United States.

The reasons can be traced to these four acronyms: NAFTA, GATT, WTO, PNTR. These are the trade treaties and global institutions that have permitted the historic substitution of foreign labor for American labor, to the enrichment of the transnational companies that look upon the Congress as a wholly owned subsidiary….

For the Bush Republicans, the chickens are coming home to roost….

At a weekend conference on immigration and jobs hosted by The American Cause, which this writer chairs, one speaker blurted out that while he voted for Bush in 2000, he would never do so again. The room erupted in applause, though virtually all there were conservatives, and all had once been Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans.”

— Pat Buchanan, author of
A Republic, Not an Empire

Happy Ides, Caesar.

A Game of
Texas Hold’em

From Lou Dobbs Tonight, March 12, 2004:

ART WARS at Harvard

From today’s Harvard Crimson:

“The VES [Visual and Environmental Studies] department is still recovering, both internally and in public perception, from the firing of former chair Ellen Phelan in spring 2001. Phelan, a distinguished painter who brought in top New York artists, was replaced by Kenan Professor of English Marjorie Garber, an English scholar with no formal background in the practice of visual arts.”

Here’s more on Phelan and art at Harvard (rated R for colorful language).

See also Strike That Pose.

Profile in Courage:

Bush Distances Himself from Aide
on Exporting Jobs

Thursday, February 12, 2004  1:23 PM ET

“The (economic) numbers are good. But I don’t worry about numbers, I worry about people,” Bush told students and teachers at a high school in Pennsylvania — a pivotal state in this year’s election and one of the hardest hit by factory job losses during his presidency.

Without mentioning by name the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, Bush said he was concerned “there are people looking for work because jobs have gone overseas” and vowed to “act to make sure there are more jobs at home” by keeping taxes low and by retraining displaced workers. Bush offered no new initiatives to curb outsourcing and aides said he opposed restrictions on free trade.

“You can fool all of the people
all of the time.”

— Art Buchwald

T is for Texas

“Gimme a T for Texas“
— Jimmie Rodgers

“T is for Texas” — Anne Bustard,
University of Texas at Austin

“From 1928 to 1933
he was chairman of the
Mount Rushmore
National Memorial Committee.”
— Handbook of Texas Online
on Joseph Stephen Cullinan,
founder of Texaco

“‘Is this Hell? Or is this Texas?”
— Job: A Comedy of Justice 

Straw Dogs

See also
Quotations for
Chairman George

Today's birthdays: Mike Nichols and Sally Field.

From A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar:

Prologue

Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
— WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

John Forbes Nash, Jr. — mathematical genius, inventor of a theory of rational behavior, visionary of the thinking machine — had been sitting with his visitor, also a mathematician, for nearly half an hour. It was late on a weekday afternoon in the spring of 1959, and, though it was only May, uncomfortably warm. Nash was slumped in an armchair in one corner of the hospital lounge, carelessly dressed in a nylon shirt that hung limply over his unbelted trousers. His powerful frame was slack as a rag doll's, his finely molded features expressionless. He had been staring dully at a spot immediately in front of the left foot of Harvard professor George Mackey, hardly moving except to brush his long dark hair away from his forehead in a fitful, repetitive motion. His visitor sat upright, oppressed by the silence, acutely conscious that the doors to the room were locked. Mackey finally could contain himself no longer. His voice was slightly querulous, but he strained to be gentle. "How could you," began Mackey, "how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof…how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you…?"

Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. "Because," Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."

What I  take seriously:

Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis, by George F. Simmons, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1963 

An Introduction to Abstract Harmonic Analysis, by Lynn H. Loomis, Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1953

"Harmonic Analysis as the Exploitation of Symmetry — A Historical Survey," by George W. Mackey, pp. 543-698, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, July 1980

Walsh Functions and Their Applications, by K. G. Beauchamp, Academic Press, New York, 1975

Walsh Series: An Introduction to Dyadic Harmonic Analysis, by F. Schipp, P. Simon, W. R. Wade, and J. Pal, Adam Hilger Ltd., 1990

The review, by W. R. Wade, of Walsh Series and Transforms (Golubov, Efimov, and Skvortsov, publ. by Kluwer, Netherlands, 1991) in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, April 1992, pp. 348-359

Music courtesy of Franz Schubert.